Solution providers were keen to buy firms with specific vendor expertise last month. Five of the 10 acquired firms in our report specialize in suppliers ranging from Cisco, Microsoft and Xerox to ServiceNow and SugarCRM.

The channel saw massive business model transformation in 2016, with top vendors unloading legacy IT outsourcing units to focus on their core business, and broadline players buying their way into the cloud, telecom, and hyper-converged infrastructure.

At WOTC 2016 in New York City, a panel of IT vendor executives discuss the changes they are making to partner programs to encourage solution selling, and the vendors' evolving value proposition to partners.